Voices & Visions

The life and work of the poet Elizabeth Bishop are examined in this volume of the Voices & Visions documentary series. Bishop, who died in her late sixties in 1979, left behind a respectable body of work, including many poems that reflected her strong interest in perception and exploring the boundaries of consciousness. Mary McCarthy and Octavio Paz provide commentary. Readings of several of Bishop's poems are presented in the program, including The Moose, Pink Dog and One Art.

This film, narrated by Jose Ferrer, profiles the life of American poet Hart Crane. Born on July 29, 1899, Crane was a mystic who perceived the dark side of the Industrial Revolution. He voiced his sentiments in two volumes of poetry published during his lifetime: The Bridge and White Buildings. Crane's personal life, known for its debauchery, was chronicled in his works. He took his own life when he jumped from a steamer returning from Mexico, where he was a Guggenheim Fellow. Fellow artists Malcolm Cowley and Peggy Cowley describe their final moments with Crane before he jumped. He was 33 when he died. Interviews, film clips, and photographs illustrate the video.

This program chronicles the life and works of beloved 19th century American poet, Emily Dickinson. The reclusive woman wrote around 1,700 poems, of which only 10 were published during her lifetime. Archival photography and a visit to Dickinson's Massachusetts home set the stage for readings from her works. In simple verse, she expressed deep feelings and insights, in poems such as Because I Could Not Stop for Death and A Certain Slant of Light. Scholars discuss the poet's importance in American letters.

One of the major literary figures of the 20th century, American-born Eliot spent most of his life in England which is why, if you're studying English literature, you're bound to run into him in both your American and English lit classes. His groundbreaking poems (-The Wasteland and -Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock) set a new standard for all poetry written in English, a standard still debated in the academic world. Eliot wrote important literary criticism and wrote plays. This video features footage of the Anglican church in the English village of East Coker, and poets and authors read form his work and discuss his impact.

Robert Frost was America's leading pastoral poet. He demonstrated in his verse that nature is man's most revealing mirror--and the clearest window into human personality. That conviction led him to explore the darkest forces of both nature and humanity. Some readers, comparing him to modernists like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, consider Frost a traditional poet. Others regard his work as complex and multilayered, wholly new in its own way. Frost himself evaded the question with characteristic understatement: "I am [not] un-designing," he said.

Langston Hughes, among the most versatile and prolific of modern American authors, achieved distinction in poetry, fiction, and drama. Race is at the center of his work--the beauty, dignity, and heritage of blacks in America. But Hughes was never racist--he always sought to speak to all Americans, especially on the larger issues of social, economic, and political justice.

Considered the leading poet of his generation, Robert Lowell in his early work examined history--employing the past to make commentaries on the present. In the 1950s, the poet began to merge public with personal history. Following the lead of the so-called confessional poets, his own style shifted from densely textured formalism to the more open structures and autobiographical subject matter that would characterize a great deal of American poetry to the present day.

Scholars have marveled at the paradoxes of Marianne Moore--how her verse can show such propriety amidst such caprice, or use such artifice to celebrate the natural, or seem so modern while being unabashedly old-fashioned. In fact, Moore's "wild decorum" is an accurate reflection of her character and values, exalting a gusto (as she said) that gets things done without running roughshod, a propriety that refuses to wink, distort, or disdain. But for all this down-to-earth practicality, her long, artfully poised sentences and strict but arbitrarily syllabic stanza forms also force us to a self-conscious awareness of the language itself.

Sylvia Plath's status as a major American poet has been obscured by her reputation as a martyr, a victimized woman whose tragic life finally ended in suicide. Nevertheless, there are many who insist the poems in her posthumously published volume, Ariel, represent the most dazzling and productive short period of writing since Keats. In this verse, it is argued, Plath fully realizes the Keatsian sense of the sweetness of death--a longing to be swallowed up by something greater than oneself, to become part of the eternal.

The complicated life and writings of the poet Ezra Pound are discussed in this volume of the Voices & Visions series. Born and educated in America, Pound lived most of his life in England. He is best known for his work The Cantos, much of which was written in an American mental hospital where he had been confined after being charged with treason for antiwar broadcasts he had made from Italy. Also explored are Pound's relationship with his wife and collaborator Dorothy Shakespear and his dedicated promotion of the work of other writers, including T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. Scholar Hugh Kenner, critic Alfred Kazin, publisher James Laughlin, and Pound's daughter (whose mother was his lover, Olga Rudge) provide information, commentary, and reminiscences. Recordings of Pound and various actors reading excerpts from his works are also featured.

The hero of Wallace Stevens's poetry is the human imagination. Like Emily Dickinson's, Stevens's sedate and uneventful outer life concealed a lush and adventurous inner one. Such adventures were for Stevens not an escape from reality but a journey toward a new reality. Although Stevens was no philosopher--he was a bold and brilliant poet--he explored the workings of the human mind with a precision philosophers might envy.

Walt Whitman was the first major poet to create a truly American vision and style. His extraordinary example gave American verse much of its subsequent character and diction. Rejecting traditional constraints of form and subject matter, Whitman considered democracy itself appropriate grist for his own poetic mill, inventing a radically different sort of free verse to express what he had to say. In fact, newcomers to Whitman's work may enjoy learning all about this man who once stated in the preface of "Leaves of Grass" that "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem."

Born in 1883, the gifted writer William Carlos Williams was also a doctor who practiced as a pediatrician in New Jersey. He wrote stories, plays, and poems, capturing the imaginations of many. His first published work Poems appeared in 1909. He befriended many other artists and writers, including Allen Ginsberg and Ezra Pound. Williams later wrote the introduction to one of Ginsberg's books. In this video, Ginsberg and others seek to draw connections between the industrialization of America and Williams' poetry. The video also notes how Williams sought to create a unique American voice for poetry, one centered around everyday people and events. Though he produced many popular writings, Williams managed to continue practicing medicine throughout his life. His son also chose to become a writer and doctor. Williams received the Pulitzer Prize in 1963, the same year he died.